Lara Marlow in Algiers
IN the manner of Michael Collins, invisible to British security as he rode his bicycle through Dublin, Abu Mohammed blended into the hotel, passing under the noses of dozens of armed plainclothes men in the lobby.
In his twenties, cleanshaven and in stylish clothes, he looked more like a member of Algeria’s pampered elite than a guerrilla from the maquis.
“My emir [commander] says that it is good that I keep this appearance. It is very useful to us,” laughed Mohammed. He said the Islamists were “forced to keep killing” government employees because “they don’t follow Islam”.
If Algerians thought their latest election would bring them peace, the few weeks have proved them mistaken.
Earlier this month came news of fresh atrocities: a total of 29 men, women and children massacred in two villages 11km south-west of Algiers. Ten victims, including seven women, were decapitated.
Twenty-four hours earlier, at the village of Trab, ten members of two families were killed by axemen. Most of the women at Trab were raped before they were decapitated.
Halilal Kouk, a former Islamist leader of the area, was shot down by “patriots” – as pro-government militiamen call themselves. The Trab massacre seems to have been revenge for his death and a warning to villages that set up “patriot groups”.
Because of government censorship, many battles and massacres go unreported. Sometimes the killers take their victims head away, leaving only their torsos.
Hospital personnel try to sew the pieces back together to make it possible for neighbours or relatives to identify them.
While the Algerian government has made the main population centres slightly more secure than they were two years ago, when many were predicting a fundamentalist takeover, the country has sunk into a stalemate in which neither the army nor the fundamentalists can win.
The state’s authority has ebbed in proportion to its inability to protect its citizens. In the cities, racketeering, drug dealing, prostitution and revenge killings are widespread.
“The collapse of the state is progressive,” Said Djeddai of the opposition Front of Socialist Forces said.
“Today the state is no longer present in the countryside. In the daytime, the militias make the law. At night, the Islamic groups take over.”
Algerian journalists have also been singled out for murder by the Islamists – 69 have been killed. “They have been warned,” said Mohammed.
After President Liamine Zeroual’s election in November 1995, many Algerians were hopeful he would fulfil his promise to bring peace to Algeria. But the mood is now more hopeless than ever.
The government rigged the referendum results and Algerians see a bleak future of massacres and growing repression. The dream of democracy born in the late 1980s and early 1990s is long buried.